I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my childhood home. Last night, sleepless, and with the backing vocals of post-Derby-Day drunks on the street below my apartment, I walked in my head through the old house. Underfoot, I felt the thick wool Berber carpet that my mother had put in once she and Dad had become more financially secure; combined with the home-made, orange-flowered curtains, a triumph of ’70s style. My little brother and I were never allowed to take food onto the carpet, so it still feels like new. There it is – that old creak when you step in a particular spot in the hallway outside the bathroom. And opening the old cupboards in the bathroom – a woody note against the clean-cotton-towel smell. The books in every room; still, the childhood favourites in my bedroom – The Wind in the Willows, Swallows and Amazons, The Magic Faraway Tree; and old plays (Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Ray Lawler) hoarded with stars in my eyes during teenage amateur theatre days.
A Hole in a Tree
Still in bare feet, I’m outside now and feeling the jab and prick of burrs and fallen eucalyptus twigs and stalky grass. I stop and crouch next to my favourite tree (camphor laurel? eucalypt?), next to the hole in its trunk. It’s just a hole now, a hole in a tree, but it has the same damp, earthy smell it had when it was the entrance to an Enid-Blyton-inspired fantasy world where ants and beetles and birds had names and personalities and took a skinny little red-headed girl on adventures in her head. And, on the same tree, decaying for decades, a mere fragment of rope hanging from the branch where Dad put a tyre swing for us.
It has been a wrenching two years of change for the family: My father’s involuntary ‘retirement’, a cruel type of retirement only an elected official faces. My return to Australia from overseas, then the traumatic collapse of a relationship, which was the reason for returning and turning my back on overseas opportunities. My ‘celebration’ of a milestone birthday, the sort of milestone that precipitates life crises. A career cul-de-sac. Then, the worst of all, the devastation of my father's cancer diagnosis. Blows, disappointments, fears, regrets, worry, emotion. As my parents age and weary and grapple with my father’s health, I have never felt more, reluctantly, a grown-up.
Dismantling the Family Museum
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my childhood home. It’s a sprawling museum of a family’s life, and as cluttered as a Victorian museum – my parents are compulsive, pathological, terrifying collector-hoarders. Books (thousands of them), paintings, manchester, clothing, photographs, furniture (87 chairs, my father counted), beer steins (hundreds, don’t ask), billiard table, piano, suitcases, watches, saddle, shoes, fabric, glassware, cutlery, figurines, ornaments. We all know it’s time to dismantle the family museum, an inestimably large, daunting task that is just about beyond my parents’ capacity. A few, tentative, early steps have been taken. A parcel of land next to the house is to be auctioned in a week or two. My Enid Blyton tree, the tyre-swing tree, will have a new owner. (I hope they love it like I did.) And the smallest amount of progress is being made inside the house.
If there is to be a scrap of joy or humour to be found in this sad, slow, bitter task of disassembling, physically at least, a family’s life, it will be in the recovery and discovery of countless treasures. I know we’ll find the hats that my mother, the perfect politician’s wife, wore through the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the kaftans that succeeded them. In the dining room, sideboards are filled with delicious things – a heavy Chinese silk tablecloth reputed to have belonged to an ancestor involved with the Boxer Rebellion; a stunning, flower-edged dinner service from the ’30s; cruet sets and tea sets and platters and ladles and punch bowls. In the hall cupboard, I know there’s a box holding Great Aunt Amy's tissue-wrapped wedding dress from the ’20s.
Thank heavens for dear, childless Amy, who lived for many years in San Francisco and who bequeathed her possessions to my mother. This week, Dad mailed to me a parcel full of little booklets – free cookbooks from companies and organisations such as the Hardwick Stove Company (Cleveland Tennessee); Carvel Hall Cutlery; the College of Agriculture, University of California, Berkley; the Club Aluminum Company (Mission Street, San Francisco); Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; the Sperry Home Service (Sperry Drifted Snow Home Perfected Enriched Flour); Kilpatrick’s Bread; the Wine Advisory Board (Market Street, San Francisco). Amy must have sent away for every gift offer she saw.
If only she knew how much I appreciate her efforts, how much I’m going to enjoy discovering her life as my own shifts before me.
